So this was supposed to be posted last week, but stuff got in the way. Now I took some time to finally post this. Since, well, yesterday you showed me again that you love this section and
actually I do, too.

To see the new lecture click on 'Mehr lesen' below.

Ah, you clicked on 'Mehr lesen' (which means 'Read more' btw) I'm glad you did and that you actually do want to learn more (from me). Over the time that has passed since the last lesson I've
become sure now(not that I wasn't sure before!) that there are people out there that are 100% better teachers than I am for the german language. But I won't let myself be stopped Haha And will
continue to try to teach you a thing or two when actually I have no clue about my own language (Yes, some of you proofed that to me once again with your questions ;D ) Also I've watched and heard
that you are helping each other out and I think that's the greatest thing and actually the way to do it - learning this bloody language. But enough of the chit chat! On we go with the
lesson.

Lesson 2

Numbers

We watched Jenny and Bodo struggle with this and you soon will see Emma taking a look into a book of it, too. Math. I mean, math! Wtf!? Yeah, so we won't do any math. But numbers? Hmm..yeah they
could come in handy. Like when ordering those croissants for your traumatisierte Freundin. I mean, will she eat one or two? (If she was actually going to stay and not storm out.) So yes, numbers
are something important. So this lecture might seem long, but it should be easy. (If you can count. - I won't be able to teach that to you, too. I mean Jenny isn't that good in math, so I guess
math shouldn't be that important to us either anyway. But if you do need to learn math then call Timo (or our 'Federal Chancellor' Frieda =P ).)

Let's start by counting up to twelve – let's call them the 'irregular-', or up to ten 'basic numbers'.

Now we'll do a little 'game' here. You'll find german words which sneaked their way into the descriptions.

Can you riddle out what they mean? :)

One – Eins

(Like Saal Eins)

Two – Zwei

(Zwei people make an adorable Paar)

Three – Drei

(Drei people are always too viel. Get out Hotte+Ben!)

Four – Vier

(Vier Geschwister they are in Emma's family.)

Five – Fünf

(We get fünf new Folgen of Hahe each week, except there are these damn german holidays ;) )

Six – Sechs

(Like the sechs Seiten of Emma's dice earrings)

Seven – Sieben

(Sieben days a Woche we yearn for Jemma)

Eight – Acht

(There were acht Szenen in which we were blessed with our girls kissing. (until ep177))

Nine – Neun

(There are neun official Mitglieder+Ex-Mitglieder of the STAG)

Ten – Zehn

(Jenny paints her zehn Fingernägel often black, grey or blue.)

Eleven – Elf

(Elf is a number of Tage I hope Emma will never ever wear her plaid shirt without changing/washing it.)

Twelve – Zwölf

(Zwölf, a number that the actually participating member Anzahl of the STAG will never reach)

(Did you get what the german words meant without looking them up? ^^ )

Now you're being clever for a few numbers and do the 'teen' thing, but hey, we can do that, too!

Thirteen – Dreizehn

Fourteen – Vierzehn

Fifteen – Fünfzehn

Sixteen – Sechzehn

Seventeen – Siebzehn

Eighteen – Achtzehn

Nineteen – Neunzehn

So we take the 'basic number' and add zehn (ten) to it. Easy, right?

We go on with:

Twenty – Zwanzig (pronounciation: 'ig' like 'ich'. Go back and read Kristen's comment on the last lesson. It's gold.)

Now it's getting a tiny bit more complicated, but not as much as the french. Those guys are like crazy. Sorry french friends, but for counting in your language you need a math diploma, adding,
multiplying and what not. Quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, do I need to say more? It would be nice to tell us what you do with those numbers, beside crunching them. Anyway, let's continue.

Twenty one – Einundzwanzig

What we do is the same like you do, you put twenty and one together, just that we like to do it the other way around and also notify you that we did that by adding an 'und' (and) in the middle.

So it's continuing like this.

Twenty two – Zweiundzwanzig

Twenty three – Dreiundzwanzig

Twenty four – Vierundzwanzig

...

And so on just add the 'basic numbers' and the 'und' in front of the 'zwanzig'. The same you will do with all other tens and you'll notice that most of the time a 'zig' is being added to
the'basic number' to create the following numbers.

Thirty – Dreißig

Thirty one – Einunddreißig

…

Forty – Vierzig

Fifty – Fünfzig

Sixty – Sechzig

Seventy – Siebzig

Eighty – Achtzig

Ninety – Neunzig

Hundred – Hundert

Now it's getting interesting again.

One hundret and one – Einhundert(und)eins

One hundred and two – Einhundert(und)zwei

Multiplying eins*hundert and adding eins or zwei or drei or dreizehn or vierundfünfzig at the end. The 'und' after 'hundert' gets swallowed in the spoken language most of the time.

It's going on like this up to Einhundertneunundneunzig and then comes two hundred – zweihundert, dreihundert,
vierhundert......

You get the gist. So from now on you are able to count the beauty marks on Emma's arms, the number of times they transfix each other with their passion vision or the minutes and seconds until
there will be a new jemma clip somewhere flouting around in the web for you to enjoy, in German.

Grandma Grammar - Articles

Last time we learned that Nouns have souls. So what do we know about souls? Not much, right? Allegedly it weights 21grams, but sadly I have no data if that applies to nouns, too. But, every soul
of a human being I know has a gender, so, since going by me the nouns also have a soul, they do have a gender, too. They like to identify themselves and tell us if they're beautiful women or
rough men, or can't decide or would rather be seen as neither nor. That are nouns to you, complicated beings.

So nouns like to be addressed as Der (male), Die (female) or Das (asexual).

Let's get to the examples right away:

The flower Jenny left on Emma's plate as she did breakfast for her was very beautiful, so we conclude: Flower? Beautiful! –> female! And guess what, that's true.

Flower – Die Blume

Let's go on to our male friends. The lockers of Pestalozzi are blue and orange, but that doesn't matter. They are both male, because they are metallic and that's pretty male and they can be
thrown shut with a loud clank. So we conclude lockers are male and again that is totally true.

Locker – Der Spind

What about the asexual nouns? There are the ones that can't decide what they generally are because they can be both. Like cars. See as an example Ben's car. It's very masculine – edgy, fast and
rough, but then look at some other cars with those nice curves and their total beauty. Like Emma's. Imagine which car Emma would drive if she had her own. Would it be male? We conclude, sometimes
you can't generalize which gender a noun has because it can take on both shapes. So cars? Asexual.

Car – Das Auto

But there are other nouns that struggle to put on a defining gender, because they simply do not have defining attributes that make you go 'Oh, that's a girl/boy!'. Let's take events. Like 'the
event', 'the coming out', 'the end'. Female or male? Well, all can be beautiful, relieving or soothing. They can be painful. They can be sudden. They can be rough. They can be pretty much
everything you can imagine and non of it has to be the case at an other event, coming-out or end.

Like Jemma's coming-out. Love Fool being sung on the books? Beautifully heart-clenching good, being terrorized by people writing mean stuff on your locker (der Spind, remember?) not so
beautifully heart-clenching good, but painfully testosterone causing bad. We learn, for example, 'coming-out' can't be defined. All of the above words are very fluent and thus like to stay
asexual.

Event – das Event

Coming out – das Coming-out

End – das Ende

Alright, I admit, those rules I just told you will not always or actually never be the regular case. The first one with the beautiful ones being female is actually what my father told me when I
was learning the french articles. But generally speaking you can use that rule I told you. It's just that, you know some souls identify as male but just come off as being quite female and the
other way around. So you never know. See, language is representative of real life.

But really, learning the articles to the nouns will be a pain in the ass. The only way to get through it is to learn them by heart and pay attention to it when reading/listening to stuff, so that
slowly you will get a feeling for it. Sorry, no other way around that.

Sentence of the Week (06/13-07/17/11)

Oh so many! I mean there was this whole Jemma adorableness going on last week! But in the end I decided for this:

One question of your girlfriend that you definitely should know how to answer:

Emma: “Wie war ich?” - “How was I?”

What a question Emma! But Jenny shows you what the right answer is, girls. Always.

Jenny: “Zum verlieben.” - “To fall in love with.”

Vocabular you learned Today

Numbers:

From eins to neunhundertneunundneunzig. (Then follows tausend, by the way.
Tausendundeins, tausendundzwei, .........)

User request

Today we hopefully answered the question of those weird nouns and their moods to take on gender. Hope it helped SPPPOOONNNY! and if not (because actually I doubt it) then I hope you at least got
a laugh out of it.

So for next time: Anything you always wanted to know! A word, a saying or anything that has to do with language, ask us and we'll try to come up with an answer for it. Feel free to use the
comments or send us a mail to: jemmaclips [at] gmx [dot] de

Kommentare: 15

#1

Kristen(Mittwoch, 22 Juni 2011 20:46)

You are so funny; I love reading these! I'm glad you did numbers, because I actually can't count above 100. Let's say you were at the butcher shop and wanted 100g of ground turkey. Would you use say
"a hundred" or "one hundred"? One quick thing--sixteen is sechzehn. I only know that because I had a very hard time remembering it. Please keep on doing these lessons.

Hey Kristen,
sixteen-sechzehn, yes of course. Woops ;) Spelling is the best friend of grammar and since grammar and I are mortal enemies, I don't get along with spelling either. ;D

So this is a tricky question you're asking. Again, the things you people learning german think about. I'm always fascinated by it, because these are thoughts that have never entered my mind before.
haha So I'd say "I'd like to have one hundred gram." - "Ich möchte gerne einhundert Gramm." But since 'a' is 'ein' in german you had me doubting it for a moment. But then "Ich möchte gerne ein
hundert Gramm" doesn't make much sense, because 'hundert' isn't the object in this sentence. But using 'ein' it would make 'hundert' to the object or mark 'hundert Gramm' together as one object.
Instead we have einhundert as an...describing word (adjective?). How much gram turkey do you want to have? Einhundert. - I'm sorry was this understandable? ^^###

#3

Wuschdibusch(Mittwoch, 22 Juni 2011 21:58)

Great blog entry, as always =)
But Miss ... Miss ... Frau Lehrerin von Jemma International, *waves hand frantically*, may I be the first one today to try my luck at "klugscheißen"? ^^
Don't despair you poor people out there - there actually is some help for your der/die/das-problem, e.g.: http://german.about.com/cs/vocabulary/a/nsuffix.htm
I know, I know, remembering the gender of a German noun can still be a "Giftzwerg" as Jenny would say but I hope the link will make it a bit easier for you. Have fun/ viel Spaß =D

#4

Kristen(Mittwoch, 22 Juni 2011 23:55)

@jemmatranslations

Yeah, that's clear. I didn't think about "one" and "a" being the same in German.

#5

Spoony(Donnerstag, 23 Juni 2011 03:51)

Mmm, yes plurals are always "die". Which, and I speak from experience here, really comes in handy if you can't remember whether it should be der/die/das for a singular noun.. Just increase the number
and suddenly all your problems are over. Ordering a meal? Order two! Buying a beer? Buy two! Getting a ticket to the cinema? Get two! And fill the empty seat with the two bags of popcorn and two
cokes you had to buy at the kiosk..

I am so happy that Jemma really helped to improve My German! I'm trying to watch the scene now without subtitles ... and guess what? I just started to watch 'Wicked' where Lucy plays as Glinda there,
and I can understand a bit of some sentence there!! Sooo glücklich!

Ich kann nicht warten für die nächste Lektion! :D

@Spoony: Good idea! Just make everything plural! Haha! But having two girlfriends is not a good idea, no? -grins-

Hehe, I liked the way you tried to explain the whole feminine(female)/masculine (male)/neutrum(asexual) thing ;) It is a shame that it doesn't always work in such a logical way (as you said your
self), just look at the German word for girl - das Mädchen = neutrum (asexual!). A pretty important and in my opinion somewhat funny exception ;)
Well at least, when you look at it, the Mädchen-exception has a logical reason: it ends with "chen", and for all of you German-virgins, if it ends with "chen", then it is neutrum (=das)!(again maybe
with some exceptions, but can't think of any - BUT I am not German myself, so my German vocabulary isn't that big)

And another gender-guessing-tip: If a noun ends with "e" or especially if it ends with "ung" there is a good chance (not that it is certain at all, there is a lot of exceptions to this one) that it
is feminine. Not every time, but it is likely.

And yeah, like Spoony says, it is really handy that it is always "die" with plurals (well, not always, there is something called "kasus" (is it called that in English and German too? I only know for
sure, that it is called that in Danish), but I guess that is a bit much to introduce just yet ;))

Thanks for the German lessons, Lied, I had totally forgotten how much fun German was!!:) "Jemma" is SO making me consider studying this language, well, then at least I would have a brilliant excuse
for watching it over and over again... (but I am doing that already ;))

Hugs :)

#9

Clara(Donnerstag, 23 Juni 2011 21:06)

sooooo are there a lot of spoilers in here or am i just slow?

#10

Suz(Donnerstag, 23 Juni 2011 23:54)

Genial!

:-)))

#11

Flora(Freitag, 24 Juni 2011 05:34)

Oh, man, this forum rocks! So, on this gender question, I have a question specifically about what German (or Spanish, or any heavily genderized language) gay grrrls say in certain situations when we
are asked direct questions about our spouses, but we may not be in an environment where we'd rather out ourselves at that moment.

In English, if we get a question about our "husband", we can often cover (without calling them "him") by using gender-neutral terms "My spouse/partner/significant other is a doctor." doesn't have to
denote gender at all. Or like you discuss above, we can go plural. "They're in computer programming." Dropping pronouns can even slide these days, and the lack of pronouns may alert another gay
person's radar. :-}

In Spanish, I've grappled with this in my travels at times, "Mi esposa es doctora." or "Mi esposo es doctor.", it's pretty clear whether or not you live with someone who's likely to leave the toilet
seat up.

So how do German gay grrrls talk about their spouses in unknown territory? I looked up "spouse" in the dictionary, and it seems to have gender-specific renderings "Eheparter(in)"... is that word used
much?

Oh, and @Clara, do you mean the example phrases from Emma and Jenny? They aren't spoilers, it's what they said after their outing kiss in the schoolyard, the beginning of Folge 177.

Man, I really need to figure out how to type German characters on my US keyboard...

#12

Flora(Freitag, 24 Juni 2011 06:13)

@Lied - btw, your numbers lesson reminds me of what I really love about German - how logical it is! Big compound words, yes, but they make perfect sense! ::happy sigh::

@Rul Arshana - if you'd like to see the words with the singing, German lyrics for Wicked are here:

http://wickedlyrics.livejournal.com/
Along with many other languages! :-}

And do try to find a vid of Lucy singing "Wie Ich Bin" with Roberta Valentini as Elphie. Holy moly, talk about chemistry...

#13

Sonia(Freitag, 24 Juni 2011)

Easy to understand, and well done....as always! :-D

#14

Carrie(Freitag, 24 Juni 2011 10:42)

Einfach klasse!
Oder besser: das ist soooo toll! :))

#15

Rui_Arshana(Samstag, 25 Juni 2011 21:31)

Woah, Flora, thank you for the link!

I have seen so many Wicked video in youtube and I LOVEE IT!! -I have become a Glinda / Elphaba shipper now, just so you know, haha-